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The sky at Oakmont Country Club was somehow both hazy and bright, and the contradiction was a nice accidental framework for what we saw from Rory McIlroy in his opening round of the U.S. Open on Thursday. Inside his brain, and outside on the golf course, there often seem to be two or more antithetical things happening at once. If you’re foolish enough to have expectations in the first place, they’re constantly defied.
Did you think the collapse at Pinehurst last year might, at long last, after a decade of near-misses, break him? Wrong! He began working harder than ever, won at Pebble Beach and the Players, then grabbed the career slam at one of the most dramatic majors we’ve ever seen.
Did you think winning the Masters would free his soul, and that, unfettered, he’d unleash an epic run and leave his contemporaries in the dust as he raced to ten majors? Wrong! Starting at the PGA Championship at his favourite course in the world, Quail Hollow, he didn’t even seem happy, much less play well. He and his team executed an unbelievably bad strategy to let what should have been a dud of a story—his non-conforming driver—blossom into something annoying. The bad play continued at the Canadian Open, where he missed the cut with a Friday 78, and in a practice round at Oakmont, where he admitted to shooting an 81.
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Did you think all of that weirdness meant he’d flame out Thursday in his first round? Wrong! He shot a two-under 33 on the front nine and stood in second place heading to the turn.
Did you think that meant he was back, the driver issues were fixed, and he’d be a serious contender at the U.S. Open? Wrong! He turned in a 41 on the back to finish with a four-over 74 and could be eight to 10 shots off the lead by day’s end.
It is all, truly, head-spinning stuff, and it’s hard to know what to say after following that gruesome back nine, where the glacial pace—the round took approximately five hours, 40 minutes—must have contributed to his irritation. The trouble began on Hole 1 (McIlroy played the back nine first), when a gorgeous 378-yard drive put him 106 yards to the pin, but he left his approach woefully short and three-putted. He crossed the bridge over the interstate on Hulton Road, his tan pants and light yellow shirt almost blending with the air, made a pair of pars, and then lost his purchase on red numbers permanently on 4.
Warren Little
That’s where his driver, brilliant to that point, began to revolt. His tee shot sailed away from the church pews and all the way to the native area on the right of the fairway. By the time he made the 309-yard walk, a dozen people had begun the search, which bore fruit shortly after he arrived. But Oakmont, which had bided its time, now came alive. His next shot went 64 feet to the grassy front face of a bunker, and the one after didn’t even make it half that distance. A lone laugh, more like a cackle, rang out cruelly after that one, but undeterred, he punched out to the fairway and made a heroic up-and-down from 178 yards to save bogey.
Unfortunately, the trouble had just begun. On the tee of the par-3 sixth, the only sound breaking up the hum of a nearby generator was the occasional cheer from afar, or a drone racing 15 feet above our heads. He yanked his tee shot, and despite a nice chip to five feet, his par putt sailed by on the right.
“Remember that in New York, baby!” a fan in the grandstand shouted, giving a hint of the decorum we can expect at the Ryder Cup.
At that point, a slow day somehow became slower, although a slight breeze rippling through the red fescue granted a brief reprieve from the heat. The sound of the traffic from the Pennsylvania Turnpike was audible now, and a whistle from a train on the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad pierced that hum. He suffered another three-putt on seven to drop to two over, and finally, on the obscenely long par-3 eighth, the coup de grace: his second shot right of the green got caught in the bedeviling rough, and a failure to go up and down led to his only double bogey of the day, and his final margin of four over.
The ninth green is a strange scene, with the back half of the green reserved for practice, and as he made his way up to the green for a concluding par, a dozen or more faces glanced over, from Rahm to Spieth to DJ to Morikawa. They saw him walk off, face more or less emotionless despite whatever was happening in his thoughts.
As for that, we’ll have to guess, because after signing his card, he glanced at the pack of journalists on his walk to the clubhouse, perhaps mouthed the word “no” to a USGA official, and apparently left out the back. This was not unexpected—skipping post-round media is standard practice for him right now, and as he has become fond of saying, until it’s andatory, it’s going to keep happening.
Despite the temptation, though, we won’t try to guess what he’s thinking or doing. There’s been plenty of that in the last year, and even the last decade, and with someone this volatile, this inscrutable, and this unpredictable, those guesses aren’t worth a plugged nickel. And like the proverbial weather, if you don’t like what you’re seeing from him, just wait a few minutes.
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Main Image: Andy Lyons
